Sorry to mislead the few good folks reading this post.  The War That Gets Too Little Attention isn't REALLY happening with Afghanistan or really in the end with Afghans.  It’s with everyone else.  Afghanistan has been the site of proxy wars in the past and it is once again.  During the Great Game the British and Russians vied for control of Central Asia and Afghanistan was at the heart of that game of Risk.  During the late 1970s and during the course of most of the 1980s, Afghanistan was the setting for one of the hot spots in the Cold War between the US and USSR.

Today, it’s the strange battleground between the US and its allies and the Al Quaeda/Taliban/Pakistani nexus…and if that wasn’t enough, it’s with a variety of other players too.  If you want to add complexity to the situation, you can throw in other regional players such as Russian, Iran, India, and China into the mix.  Afghans seem incidental in the equation.  There are numerous players and interests.  Let’s take a quick review.

Pakistan has the most direct interest in Afghanistan.  As a long narrow country that has a long and massive border with a significantly larger neighbor India, Afghanistan provides “strategic depth” to Pakistan on a variety of dimensions.  Afghanistan is, in a sense, Pakistan’s backyard and fall back point.  The Pakistani Inter-services Intelligence agency (or ISI) worked with the CIA to support the Mujahadeen in the 1980s when Pakistan and the US were working together to eject the Russians from Afghanistan.  The Mujahadeen morphed into the Northern Alliance and Taliban after the US and Russians disengaged.  The Russians and Indian’s were allied so the last thing the Pakistan’s wanted was the prospect of a two front war with India on the East and the Russians on the West.

 After the Russians left, the Taliban represented a reliable ally and was culturally akin to the increasingly fundamentalist leaning Pakistan military.  The Pakistani military slowly began slinking away from its secular British Sandhurst roots under the leadership of General Zia (one of Pakistans many military dictators over the years) in the 1980s.  Pakistan’s need for Afghanistan increased after the early 1970s breakaway of Bangladesh from Pakistan during one of 3 major conflicts with arch rival India.  Many people may remember that Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan and was ruled from the current capital of Pakistan in Islamabad.  But Pakistan’s reliance on Afghanistan is not just as recent as the 1970s.  In the 1940s, just after Britain gave independence to both Pakistan and India; the Pakistani’s used Afghan irregulars to march into Kashmir.  At that time the maharajah of Kashmir was trying to remain independent of both Pakistan and India.  It was a majority Muslim state ruled by a Hindu monarch.  When the Afghan irregulars showed up at his door, he was scared shitless and ceded his thrown to India.  Ever sense, Afghanistan and Pakistan have had a weird intertwined relationship.

I’ll cover the rest of the players quickly.  First, you have India which currently has some nominal number of troops in Afghanistan and a lot of engineers doing infrastructure construction.  The Indian’s don’t want the Taliban coming back into power and providing safe haven to Al Qaeda and any other gaggle of merry terrorists who love to target India.  And, they don’t want to afford Pakistan any of that “strategic depth”.  The Iranians historically have not been too friendly with the Taliban given the Taliban have really not been big fans of Shias and have been known to kill them when they find them.  Interestingly, the Iranians have sort of flipped over the last few years and been helping the Taliban given the US presence in Afghanistan.    That flip is in line with a consistent policy of destabilizing US efforts in both Iraq and now in Afghanistan.  Ironically, Iranian intelligence was actually helping the US in the early days of the Afghan conflict soon after 9/11.  Afghanistan has become one of the battlegrounds of a proxy war between the US and Iran.

The Russians want access to Afghanistan’s route to the sea in a bid to develop a gas pipeline that could bring Central Asian natural gas to the South Asian markets and ports to be shipped throughout the world.  The US wouldn’t mind a piece of this action as well.  The Afghan’s recently (and I mean on the day of the Obama inauguration) signed a security agreement with Russian to send a signal that the government in Kabul had more allies than just those in Washington.  The Chinese have a small border with Afghanistan and are close allies with Pakistan.  Anything the Pakistanis want, the Chinese are likely to comply with because the Chinese see the Pakistanis as counter weight to keep India distracted since India is the only country in the region that could even remotely offer an option to Chinese domination of that part of Asia.  And, oh by the way, the Chinese aren’t thrilled with having so many American troops so close to them.

So…that just sets some context.  I’ll post next about how the plot thickens with all of these actors.  The media rarely covers these complexities...but they should.